Creative musings in bright colors

Posts tagged ‘stamp’

I couldn’t decide if this mani reminded me more of golden tree branches (which was the intention) or a broken gemstone (which is equally cool), so I went with gemstone! Either way, these nails ended up beautifully sparkly.

I seldom reach for my pure flakie top coats. Honestly, I feel like they overwhelm the color under them (which I suppose is the point) but I feel bad covering up my base color! In this case I used a purple I don’t like much, which made me feel overall better for the focus being on the flakies :-p

Oops! I meant to post this on Friday but I ended up accidentally throwing a party instead and forgot. Sorry! Anyway, This was just a fun little floral! Fitting for almost-summer.

The new polish here is called Morgan by Zoya. What you see here is three thin coats, although I could have gotten away with two thicker coats. This is a bright blue-leaning pink, and it is quite pretty! I have been hunting for more medium tone pink cremes, and although this one is slightly darker than I was hoping for, the color borders on neon and it was fun to wear.

I love this stamp. I love love love this stamp. I didn’t even notice it when I bought the plate originally, but it is amazing! It also helps that the base color is elegant, but mostly the stamp is amazing.

Usually when I finish stamping I decide that the design just isn’t enough…that I need something else. Since it is me, this something else is usually dots. I did not even touch this design!

This was just fun to put together! This time I did two coats of Sakura over a white creme just to save some polish on Sakura. It looks just as good! I don’t know why I decided a gradient shattered stamp over it would be a good idea, but I like the end result. Was this still painful to remove? Yes. Was it worth it? Yep!

This mani was kinda fun? I don’t love it but it was playful at least! I more or less just grabbed a polish that I hadn’t used in a while (I do love my glitter bombs but they are a pain in the butt to remove, so lets be hones, I do not wear them often) and stamped over it! The whole manicure took maybe 40 minutes and 30 of those minutes were waiting for Rough Sketch to dry.

I find myself reaching for MoYou plates when my nails are particularly short, because I bought the “normal” plates and not the “XL” plates. I turns out normal means itsy bitsy nails. I can’t wear these stamps when my fingernails are even close to my preferred length! I do love the designs on this plate, but honestly that is just poor planning from MoYou’s part! Anyway, hope you enjoyed!

This mani is almost cheating – I did this while on vacation so I didn’t take any non-iphone photos! Ergo the photos are easier to edit (for whatever reason my iPhone sunlight photos need a lot less color correction than my indoor photo camera, even if the details are better on that one). ANYWAY. Purple glittery goodness!

There isn’t much to say here. I used a fantastically sparkly polish and just stamped over it. The stamping plate was not quite thick enough to not be able to see the glitter through the black polish but I actually quite like it!

I’m back! I never really left…but I did move! The new house is utterly incredible and farrr larger than we need (there are 5 bedrooms, 5!! And 8 fireplaces. Who needs 8 fireplaces?). Anyway, I only finally unpacked the nail polish two days ago, so I have been stuck working with 8 polishes for almost a month! You will see a lot of rainbow cremes coming up. This one is from the vault, I just didn’t get around to editing it before the move! This will be a theme. Regardless, sorry for disappearing on everyone for a month!

This mani was fun! A gradient, a stamp, and some fireflies! Its a weird sideways take on that famous bit of nail art by Chalkboardnails…although honestly they look very little alike. Of course, I ended up ripping the back of my middle finger open, so you guys also get the beautiful view of a bandaid :-p

Hope you enjoyed! And I will do my darndest to keep this blog updated. I have a whole lot of unshared manicures, but my time is getting tight! Although if anyone knows where to get decent (and cheap) antique furniture in St Louis I would be thrilled!

This was simple but a lot of fun to wear! I figured that pairing a magnetic polish (and magnetizing it sideways) with a weird 1920’s style stamp would look awesome. Voila! Of course, it also gave me an excuse to play with a cool new-to-me stamping plate from MoYou’s steampunk collection.

Hope you enjoyed! I know there are only two photos, but when there is no sunlight AND my nails are tiny I don’t tend to take as many pictures!

(just FYI: I am moving these next two weeks, and there is a chance that I don’t get around to editing nail art and posting. I will be back! But if the blog is post-less for the next twoish weeks it is because I am moving and did not appropriately edit nail art in advance!)

This is another old one, I painted these back in the fall too! They were supposed to be wheat sheaves or something, but the look mostly floral-y and very sparkly. Honestly, I keep forgetting that I own this base polish and it is so darn stunning!

I have an intense love/hate relationship with glitters. On the one hand, they are beautiful, and most of them have this jelly depth that leaves me staring at my nails whenever I wear them. On the other hand, they are a pain to apply (since, lets be honest, you have to place a lot of the glitters, especially larger ones) and the are REALLY a pain to remove!

Eleven at least isn’t that hard to get on the nail, the glitters are well-dispersed, uniform in size, and smallish. But it costs so much time to take off!!

I love this manicure. It is incredibly simple (its just a stamp) but the COLORS. Also, the base is seriously one of my favorite polishes. I almost never reach for it, but whenever I wear it I have to question my sanity about wearing anything else!

There isn’t much to say about this. I actually wore it back in late Fall (hence the darker colors) but I don’t care. It is stunning. I want a dress that looks like Marrow Sea. To be fair, I remain obsessed with shimmery polishes, and this one has it in spades!

Unfortunately, I still haven’t replaced my gold stamping polish, so all of my more recent manicures that involve metallic stamps have featured the same rose gold that you can see here. I really need to buy a new gold! I suppose it makes sense, but the only colors I ever run out of are my basic stamping polishes (black, white, gold, silver) and nude cremes. I want to buy more crazy glitters, but I never use them up! Too bad 🙂

Super simple and super tiny nails today! After the Christmas holidays my nails broke down to tiny nubbins. Which means I was too lazy to do any real nail art on them, and just went ahead and stamped! And for some reason I was in a tone-on-tone mood (I think I wore these at the same time as Monday’s nails). Voila!

So, not the most exciting manicure in the world, but cute enough! Hope you enjoyed. I remain incredibly jet lagged but quite happy (well, not to be back in the hospital, but certainly to be sleeping in my own bed)!

Super simple and super fast. This is one of the quasi-Christmas themed manicures I actually did over the holiday break. I more or less only took reds and greens with me, with a few stamping plates. I decided to do a tone-on-tone manicure using the wonderful opacity of every A England polish, and one of my favorite (if underused) dark green holos, Ski Lodge.

This whole manicure took less than an hour, and it was mostly waiting for Ski Lodge to dry before I could stamp. The design ended up being somewhat subtle, but since the nails were a vibrant shade of forest green, they were themselves far from subtle!

This was was fun. I decided that Apricity looked like magical sparkles (all the little purple glitters and the larger purple squares and the greyed-out background) and so I went with something magical over it. In retrospect I wish I had used a darker stamping polish, but I do kinda love this manicure!

Apricity by Cadillacquer was one of my Thanksgiving weekend buys, and it is super pretty. It is a greyed out teal, think rainy day, but filled with tiny and small glitters of purple plus larger purple squares. I love square glitter. Other than circle glitter it is my absolute favorite. This polish is very jelly-like, so it took 4 coats. This would not generally be something I was pleased by, but due to how thin it was you could see SO MUCH GLITTER DEPTH. It was actually stunning and I will wear it again despite its 4 coat requirement.

I decided that something which looked like magical glitter sparkles (I was having a 12-year-old-girl moment) deserved mythical creatures. So I grabbed a Fairytale plate from MoYou London and went to town with pegasus! Little known fact: pegasus is one of my favorite mythical creatures because it is a standard pretty creature (horse) but with WINGS. Everyone else is always into unicorns. I like things that fly 🙂

I decided to use a different gold for stamping this time as I have finally run out of my go-to stamping gold (Good as Gold by Essie) and this one does NOT work as well! The image actually picks up, it just won’t transfer because the polish dries so fast that I can’t stamp quickly enough. I need more Essie! I ended up having to hand-paint some of these gold lines, and since my nails were so itty bitty I wasn’t super invested. In retrospect, I am pretty unhappy about that because the manicure ended up quite pretty!

I also finally invested in some MoYou stamping plates (I owned none) when they had their cyber Monday sale….and I have to say I don’t love most of them. The designs are great and the etching is good (on all but one plate), but they are so small! I usually wear my nails longish, and the plates I got just won’t cover my whole nail. Maybe I should have gone with the fewer designs per plate setup, but then only the very center of each image would transfer. Its rather annoying!

Overall, another manicure with a lot of potential and mediocre execution. I also only have two photos because I did these as I came back from winter break and was too busy unpacking to take many nail photos. Also, apparently St Louis does NOT get sun in the winter (I thought Boston was bad, this is worse!) so there are no sunlight photos for this mani…or for a lot of the upcoming ones as well. Sorry!

This features another of the Zoya polishes that I bought to replace an existing polish; in this case my favorite mid-tone pink is simply empty. I tried to use it on my thumb and couldn’t get enough out of the bottle (although I did end up using a tiny sample size pink that is almost identical for comparison) Unlike my pale pink adventure, this pink polish is not nearly as close in color, nor is it as easy to use!

On my pinky, middle, and pointer fingers I have 3 thick coats of Zoya Kitridge. As it is touted on the website as a “5” and thus totally opaque, this polish is a lot more jelly-like than it should be! It was also supposed to be a bright “barbie” pink, but I honestly think it is too pale for that. It is a pretty enough color, but not what I was looking for! I also have two thin coats of Bubbly by Revlon on my ring finger, and a weird mix on my thumb (one coat of Pink Forever by Sinful Colors before it finally dried up, and one coat of Pinkini by Clinique which is an almost identical color). Regardless, Kitridge is too pale!

Then I went wonky. I decided to make a pink-to-red gradient, but I used a bright red rather than a dark red, and Kitridge is not opaque enough to gradient over Bubbly! So my poor ring finger just does not match. I ended up doing a kind of fun stamp up the middle of the gradient, but honestly I should have picked different colors!

So, overall, this manicure was a bit of a disaster. I blame Kitridge…I had a whole thing planned with a darker pink but it was not going to work with a medium-light pink! *sigh* I wish there were more comparisons on the internet, but at this point there are probably millions of shades and finishes of nail polish and that would be far too much to ask!

I have no idea. I just started playing with things and ended up here? I wanted grey, red, and pink, and somehow wound up turning to this pattern.

I started with a light grey base and layered one coat of a glitter polish overtop, to give it some flakies. I then stamped, and dotted the rest of the pattern. The only really fun part of this design is that I mixed red and white and just swirled them together, so the dot color is variegated.

I love the concept behind this nail art, but I’m honestly not sure I love the execution? I think this design is busy enough that it would work better as an accent nail and not a full mani. So, just pick one or two nails and stare at them I guess!

This mani was time-consuming because instead of using striping tape I used stamps and freehand to make everything. Basically, I stamped the initial gold triangle at my cuticle with Penny Talk and then filled in the design (which was hollow) with Juliette. Once that was top coated and dried, I did the rest. I stamped with a black creme polish the black chevrons, and then the rose gold chevron again (each was an individual stamp…so there are 4 stamps on each nail except my thumb which was 6). I then colored in the black stamps with Storm, and did my best to spare the crossing rose gold. I could have just stamped with Penny Talk after the black was all dry, but that would be ANOTHER layer of top coat and drying and I was feeling lazy. So I colored around it :-p….it probably took longer anyway.

Again, needlessly complicated, but in the end kinda cool? I’ve been back on a bit of a geometric kick recently. I wish I had time for some freehand, I’ve been feeling inspired! That’s all for today, for Friday we get back to colors and some flowers! Hope you enjoyed 🙂

Kinda 1920s, yah? Honestly, if I had been thinking about it more I would have reversed the stamps, I like the idea of the spread fan shape coming from my free edge better, but too late! Also, my gold stamping polish has official run out and I will need more.

Honestly, I just wanted to play with 212 again, it is a subtle yet pretty polish, and one of the first I ever bought when I got into nail polish in 2012. My obsession with various types and finishes of polishes have varied over the years, and the dark vampy jellies with subtle shimmer and flakies (ok, I think in that particular family I really only own two polishes) don’t get worn very much at all! So here is some love, 212.

This is so pink. SO PINK. It is too pink! I used a pink with a bit of glitter and added a pink with MORE glitter and then hearts. So, Valentine’s appropriate but it kinda made me cringe to wear it!

This was two thin coats of Mae by Zoya. It’s not a bad polish, two coats is great coverage…I just don’t love it. The glitter flakes are subtle and the shimmer has very little depth. It was an easy polish to wear, but if I want a shimmery pink I either want a lot of metallic depth or a glitter madhouse. I ended up gradienting on (mostly with dry-brush since trying to use a makeup sponge just transferred the darn glitters) Alegra by Zoya, which is a true deeper pink glitter polish, and one of my first ever Zoyas. I have to say, comparing Mae to Alegra, Mae just doesn’t measure up!

Of course I saw a heart stamp and figured my nails were already pink, so why not? And then the matching french tip stamps (I do rather love that this plate has both angled tip patterns and straight across tip patterns). SO MANY HEARTS. This is probably the most girly nail art I’ve worn this year.

How about a not-quite-traditional valentine’s day mani, for all that I think I’ve used this particular stamp at least once a year, and typically ON valentines day!

The base color here is Zoya Payton, a purple scattered holo. The base is a bit more pink-leaning, and hilariously (or not) enough it is an almost perfect dupe for TWO other polishes in my collection. I love jewel tone purples, its a problem! That said, Payton covered very well in two thicker coats and my others take three coats. However, if you happen to on LA Girl Purple Effect…you don’t need Payton. Oops!

I decided that Payton alone was not enough, so I dry marbled on a bit of LA Girl Purple Effect (which is why I know they are basically perfect dupes) and Milani Hi-Res. It was still a bit subtle…so I decided to stamp with a silver holo instead of just a silver like I had planned!

The end effect was dizzying, and you can barely see the pattern of the stamp over all the purple holo! It was still fun to wear, but I need to remember to use a creme to stamp over glitters, not another glitter! Stay tuned for more quasi-valentine’s day manis this week 🙂